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Tag Archives: NetFlix

Following are a few topics that I find interesting, but which are too short to cover in a full blog:

Surge in Online Video Subscriptions. The number of households buying online video is surging. Netflix added almost 2 million US and 6.36 million international customers in the 4th quarter of 2017. That’s 18% more than the same quarter from a year earlier. There are also a growing number of vMVPD customers. At the end of last year CBS All Access has nearly 5 million customers. Showtime OTT also has nearly 5 million customers. Sling TV now has nearly 2 million customers. AT&T DirecTV hit the 1 million customer mark in December. PlayStation Vue reported 670,000 customers in mid-December. The new YouTube service has about 300,000. Hulu is also growing but doesn’t separately report it’s live TV customers from it’s video on demand customers (reported at 17 million total in December). Note that Hulu let’s customers buy one TV series or movies without needed a subscription.

Cellphone Data Usage Growth. According to the research firm NPD the average US smartphone now is used for an average of 31.4 GB per month of data. This is combined usage between cellular and WiFi data and is evidence that people are starting to really accept the small screen for video. This is up over 25% from a year earlier. The firm reports that video accounts for 83% of the usage.

The number of people willing to use a cellphone for video has also surged. NPD reports that 67% of cellphone users watched at least one video during the 3rd quarter of 2017, up from 57% in the 2nd quarter. Another research firm, Strategic Analytics reported that worldwide cellular data usage grew 115% in 2017, or more than doubled.

Global Streaming Doubled in 2017. Conviva, which provides systems to monitor and analyze online usage also reports that online video content more than doubled last year. They report that there were 12.6 billion viewing hours of online video in 2017 measured across 2.4 billon viewing devices. They report that 58% of video viewing came from North America; 21% from Europe; 19% from Asia 2% from the rest of the world.

Satellite TV Taking the Brunt of Cord Cutting. For some reason cord cutting seemed to be hitting the two big satellite TV providers even harder than landline cable companies. Dish Networks and DirecTV together lost 4.7% of their subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2017. We can only speculate for the reasons for the shift. The bundles of the landline cable companies make it harder for customers to drop their cable subscription. But to offset this, many satellite customers are in rural areas where there is often not a good broadband alternative to cable. But perhaps the FCC’s CAF II and ACAM programs are speeding up rural broadband enough for households to consider cutting the cord. It should be noted that AT&T is pushing their DirecTV now product more than their satellite TV, which also might account for part of the shift from satellite TV.

Apple Jumps into Programming. Apple quietly has gotten into the programing business. They’ve allocated over $1 billion in 2018 for the creation of new content. They’ve landed some big-name talent such as Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon for projects. Apple doesn’t have a content platform and the industry is buzzing with speculation on how they might market and distribute the content.

Pirated Video Content on Rise. Sandvine reports that 6.5% of North American households have accessed pirated video content in the last year. I’ve read reports from Canada of companies openly advertising pirated content, including providing settop boxes that can download IPTV content directly from the Internet. Yesterday’s blog talked about new efforts by content owners to force ISPs to enforce copyright infringement.

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The big ISPs know that the public is massively in favor of net neutrality. It’s one of those rare topics that polls positively across demographics and party lines. Largely through lobbying efforts of the big ISPs, the FCC not only killed net neutrality regulation but they surprised most of the industry by walking away from regulating broadband at all.

We now see states and cities that are trying to bring back net neutrality in some manner. A few states like California are creating state laws that mimic the old net neutrality rules. Many more states are limiting purchasing for state telecom to ISPs that don’t violate net neutrality. Federal Democratic politicians are creating bills that would reinstate net neutrality and force it back under FCC jurisdiction.

This all has the big ISPs nervous. We certainly see this in the way that the big ISPs are talking about net neutrality. Practically all of them have released statements talking about how much they support the open Internet. These big companies already all have terrible customer service ratings and they don’t want to now be painted as the villains who are trying to kill the web.

A great example is AT&T. The company’s blog posted a letter from Chairman Randall Stephenson that makes it sound like AT&T is pro net neutrality. It fails to mention how the company went to court to overturn the FCC’s net neutrality decision or how much they spent lobbying to get the ruling overturned.

AT&T also took out full-page ads in many major newspapers making the same points. In those ads the company added a new talking point that net neutrality ought to also apply to big web companies like Facebook and Twitter. That is a red herring because web companies, by definition, can’t violate net neutrality since they don’t control the pipe to the customers. Many would love to see privacy rules that stop the web companies from abusing customer data – but that is a separate issue than net neutrality. AT&T seems to be making this point to confuse the public and deflect the blame away from themselves.

Stephenson says that AT&T is favor of federal legislation that would ensure net neutrality. But what he doesn’t say is that AT&T favors a bill the big companies are pushing that would implement a feel-good watered-down version of net neutrality. Missing from that proposed law (and from all of AT&T’s positions) is any talk of paid priority – one of the three net neutrality principles. AT&T has always wanted paid prioritization. They want to be able to charge Netflix or Google extra to access their networks since those two companies are the largest drivers of web traffic.

In my mind, abuse of paid prioritization can break the web. ISPs already charge their customers enough money to fully cover the cost of the network needed to support broadband. Customers with unlimited data plans, like most landline connections, have the right to download as much content as they want. The idea of an AT&T then also charging the content providers for the privilege to get to customers is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.

Consider Netflix. It’s likely that they would pass any fees paid to AT&T on to customers. And in doing so, AT&T has violated the principle of non-discrimination of traffic, albeit indirectly, by making it more expensive for people to use Netflix. AT&T will always say that are not the cause of a Netflix rate increase – but AT&T is able to influence the market price of web services, and in doing so discriminate against web traffic.

The other problem with paid prioritization is that it is a barrier to the next Netflix. New companies without Netflix’s huge customer base could not afford the fees to connect to AT&T and other large ISPs. And that barrier will stop the next big web company from launching.

I’ve been predicting that the ISPs are not going to do anything that drastically violates net neutrality for a while. They are going to be cautious about riling up the public and legislators since they understand that Congress could reinstate both net neutrality and broadband regulation at any time. The ISPs are enjoying the most big-company friendly FCC there has ever been, and they are getting everything they want out of them.

But big ISPs like AT&T know that the political and regulatory pendulum can and will likely swing the other way. Their tactic for now seems to be to say they are for net neutrality while still working to make sure it doesn’t actually come back. So we will see more blogs and newspaper ads and support for watered-down legislation. They are clearly hoping the issue loses steam so that the FCC and administration don’t reinstate rules they don’t want. But they realistically know that they are likely to be judged by their actions rather than their words, so I expect them to ease into practices that violate net neutrality in subtle ways that they hope won’t be noticed.

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The virtual MVPD (Multichannel Video Programming Distributor) market is already full of providers and is going to become even more crowded this year. Already today there is a marketing war developing between DirecTV Now, Playstation Vue, Sling TV, Hulu Live, YouTube TV, CBS All Access, fuboTV and Layer3 TV. There are also now a lot of ad-supported networks offering free movies and programming such as Crackle and TubiTV. All of these services tout themselves as an alternative to traditional cable TV.

This year will see some new competitors in the market. ESPN is getting ready to launch its sports-oriented MVPD offering. The network has been steadily losing subscribers from cord cutting and cord shaving. While the company is gaining some customers from other MVPD platforms they believe they have a strong enough brand name to go it alone.

The ESPN offering is likely to eventually be augmented by the announcement that Disney, the ESPN parent company, is buying 21st Century Fox programming assets, including 22 regional sports networks. But this purchase won’t be implemented in time to influence the initial ESPN launch.

Another big player entering the game this year is Verizon which is going to launch a service to compete with the offerings of competitors like DirecTV Now and Sling TV. This product launch has been rumored since 2015 but the company now seems poised to finally launch. Speculation is the company will use the platform much like AT&T uses DirecTV Now – as an alternative to customers who want to cut the cord as well as a way to add new customers outside the traditional footprint.

There was also announcement last quarter by T-Mobile CEO John Legere that the company will be launching an MVPD product in early 2018. While aimed at video customers the product will be also marketed to cord cutters. The T-Mobile announcement has puzzled many industry analysts who are wondering if there is any room for a new provider in the now-crowded MVPD market. The MVPD market as a whole added almost a million customers in the third quarter of 2017. But the majority of those new customers went to a few of the largest providers and the big question now is if this market is already oversaturated.

On top of the proliferation of MVPD providers there are the other big players in the online industry to consider. Netflix has announced it is spending an astronomical $8 billion on new programming during the next year. While Amazon doesn’t announce their specific plans they are also spending a few billion dollars per year. Netflix alone now has more customers than the entire traditional US cable industry.

I would imagine that we haven’t seen the end of new entrants. Now that the programmers have accepted the idea of streaming their content online, anybody with deep enough pockets to work through the launch can become an MVPD. There have already been a few early failures in the field and we’ve seen Seeso and Fullscreen bow out of the market. The big question now is if all of the players in the crowded field can survive the competition. Everything I’ve read suggests that margins are tight for this sector as the providers hold down prices to build market share.

I have already tried a number of the services including Sling TV, fuboTV, DirecTV Now and Playstation Vue. There honestly is not that much noticeable difference between the platforms. None of them have yet developed an easy-to-use channel guide and they feel like the way cable felt a decade ago. But each keeps adding features that is making them easier to use over time. While each has a slightly different channel line-up, there are many common networks carried on most of the platforms. I’m likely to try the other platforms during the coming year and it will be interesting to see if one of them finds a way to distinguish themselves from the pack.

This proliferation of online options spells increased pressure for traditional cable providers. With the normal January price increases now hitting there will be millions of homes considering the shift to online.

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Last week I talked about FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s list of myths concerning net neutrality. One of the ‘myths’ he listed is: Internet service will be provided in bundles like cable television as has happened in Portugal.

This observation has been widely repeated on social media and has been used as a warning of what would happen to us Internet access without net neutrality. The social media postings have included a screen shot of the many options of ‘bundles’ available from the mobile carrier Meo in Portugal. Taken out of context this looks exactly like mobile data bundles.

Meo offers various packages of well-known web applications that customers can buy to opt the applications from monthly data caps. For example, there is a video bundle that includes Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, Joost and TV.Com. There are a number of similar bundles like the social bundle that includes Facebook and Twitter, or the shopping bundle that contains Amazon and eBay.

But the reality is that these bundles are similar to the zero-rating done by cellular carriers in the US. The base product from Meo doesn’t block any use of cellular data. These ‘bundles’ are voluntary add-ons and allow a customer to exclude the various packaged content from monthly data caps. If a customer uses a lot of social media, for example, they can exclude this usage from monthly data caps by paying a monthly fee of approximately $5.

The last FCC headed by Tom Wheeler took a look at zero-rating practices here in the US. They ruled that the zero-ratings by AT&T and Verizon violated net neutrality because each carrier has bundled in their own content. But the FCC found that T-Mobile did not violate net neutrality when they included content from others in their zero-rating package. The current FCC has not followed through on those rulings and has taken no action against AT&T or Verizon.

The Meo bundles are similar to the T-Mobile zero-rating packages, with the difference being that the Meo bundles are voluntary while T-Mobile’s are built into the base product. The FCC is correct in pointing out that Portugal did not create mobile ‘bundles’ that are similar to packages of cable TV channels. If anything, I see these bundles as insurance – in effect, customers spend a small amount up front to avoid larger data overages later.

It is also worth noting that Portugal is a member of the European Union which has a strong set of net neutrality rules. But the EU is obviously struggling with zero-rating in the same way we are in the US. The real question this raises is if zero-rating is really a violation of net neutrality. It’s certainly something that customers like. As long as we have stingy monthly data caps then customers are going to like the idea of excusing their most popular apps from measurement against those caps. If cellular carriers offered an actual unlimited data then there would be no need for zero-rating.

I disagreed with the Wheeler FCC’s ruling on T-Mobile’s zero-rating. That ruling basically said that zero-rating is okay as long as the content is not owned by the cellular carrier. This ignores that fact that zero-rating of any kind has a long-term negative impact on competition. T-Mobile is like Meo in that they exclude the most popular web applications from data ca measurement. One of the major principles of net neutrality is to not favor any Internet traffic, and by definition, zero-rating favors the most popular apps over newer or less popular apps.

If enough customers participate in zero-rating the popular apps will maintain prominence over start-ups apps due to the fact that customers can view them for free. This is not the same thing as paid prioritization. That would occur if Netflix was to pay T-Mobile to exclude their app from data caps. That would clearly give Netflix an advantage over other video content. But voluntary zero-ratings by the cellular carriers has the exact same market impact as paid prioritization

None of this is going to matter, though, if the FCC kills Title II regulations. At that point not only will zero-rating be allowed in all forms, but ISPs will be able ask content payers for payment to prioritize their content. ISPs will be able to create Internet bundles that are exactly like cable bundles and that only allow access to certain content. And cellular carriers like AT&T or Comcast are going to be free to bundle in their own video content. It’s ironic that Chairman Pai used this as an example of an Internet myth, because killing net neutrality will make this ‘myth’ come true.

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Last year at least two million households cut the cord. I’ve seen headlines predicting that as many as 5 million more this year, although that seems too high to me. But both of these numbers are a lot lower than the number of people who say they are going to cut the cord in the coming year. For several years running various national surveys show that 15 million or more households say they want to cut the cord. But year after year they don’t and today’s blog looks at some of the reasons why.

I think one of the primary reasons people keep traditional cable is that they figure out that they won’t save as money with cord cutting as they had hoped. The majority of cord cutters say that saving money is their primary motivation for cutting the cord, and once they look hard at the actual savings they decide it’s not worth the change.

One issue that surprises a lot of potential cord cutters is the impact of losing their bundling discount if they are buying programming from a cable company. Big cable companies penalize customers who break the bundle. As an example, consider a customer who has a $50 broadband product and a $50 cable product, but for which the cable company charges $80. When a customer drops one of the two products the cable company will charge them $50 for the remaining one. That means there is a $20 penalty for cutting the cord and thus not much savings from cutting the cord.

Households also quickly realize that they need to subscribe to a number of OTT services if they want a wide array of programming choices. If you want to watch the most popular OTT shows that means a $10 subscription to Netflix, an $8.25 per month subscription to Amazon and a Hulu package that starts at $8. If you want to watch Game of Thrones you’ll spend $15 for HBO. And while these packages carry a lot of movies, if you really love movies you’ll find yourself buying them on an a la carte basis.

And OTT options are quickly proliferating. If you want to see the new Star Trek series that means another $5.99 per month for CBS All Access. If your household likes Disney programming that new service is rumored to cost at least another $5 per month.

And none of these options bring you all of the shows you might be used to watching on cable TV. One option to get many of these same networks is by subscribing to Sling TV or PlayStation Vue, with packages that start at $20 per month, but which can cost a lot more. If you don’t want to subscribe to these services, then buying whole season of one specific show can easily cost $100.

And then there is sports. PlayStation Vue looks to have the best basic sports package, but that means buying the service plus add-on packages. A serious sports fan is also going to consider buying Fubo. And fans of specific sports can buy subscriptions to Major League baseball, NBA basketball or NHL hockey.

Then there are the other 100 OTT options. There is a whole range of specialty programmers that carry programming like foreign films, horror movies, British comedies and a wide range of other programming. Most of these range from $3 to $7 per month.

There are also hardware costs to consider. Most people who watch a range of OTT programming get a media streaming device like Roku, Amazon Fire, or Apple TV. Customers that want to record shows shell out a few hundred dollars for an OTT VCR. A good antenna to get local programming costs between $30 and $100.

The other reason that I think people don’t cut the cord is that it’s not easy to navigate between the many OTT options. They all have different menus and log-ins and it can be a pain to navigate between platforms. And it’s not easy to find what you want to watch, particularly if you don’t have a specific show in mind. It’s hard to think that it’s going to get any easier to use the many OTT services since they are in competition with each other. It’s hard to ever see them agreeing on a common interface or easy navigation since each platform wants viewers to stay on their platform once logged in.

Finally, none of these combinations gets you everything that’s on cable TV today. For many people cutting the cord means giving up a favorite show or favorite network.

If anything, OTT watching is getting more complicated over time. And if a household isn’t careful they might spend more than their old cable subscription. I’m a cord cutter and I’m happy with the OTT services I buy. But I can see how this option is not for everybody.

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It’s always a good idea for anybody that offers a cable product to keep an eye on what is going on with the programmers. Probably the number one problem for small cable operators is the never-ending increase in the prices paid to buy programming. Here are some of the current trends that are going to impact the cost of buying cable programming over the next few years:

Subscriber Losses Continue. All of the major programmers are losing customers. Probably the most widely discussed is ESPN that has lost 13 million customers since 2011. But it’s happening across the board to all of them to a slightly lesser extent.

The loss of customers puts obvious earnings pressure on the programmers. They are now facing a classic Catch-22 situation. If they try to make up for lost revenues by raising rates even faster they are likely to lose customers even faster. It’s getting to be pretty clear that cable rate increases are the driving force behind a lot of cord-cutting. But probably even more important that cord-cutting is cord-shaving where millions of customers are opting for smaller and less expensive channel line-ups. At this point cord-shaving is costing the programmers more loses than cord-cutting – but we don’t know the numbers since the big cable companies are not releasing statistics on cord-shaving.

Advertising Taking a Hit. We are also seeing a crossover point and late last year we saw more advertising being done on the web than on TV. In this latest quarter we are finally starting to see real declines in TV advertising revenue – a far cry from year-after-year growth in ad revenues for the cable networks. For years programmers were on a trajectory of expecting healthy growth of both subscriber revenues and ad revenues, and both are starting to sink at the same time.

At this point the drop in advertising revenues is tiny, but it’s going to get worse as ad spending continues to shift to online. And the ad dollars are not only dropping for the programmers, but drops in advertising are affecting local ad revenues for television stations and cable companies.

Ad revenues are sinking due the shrinking in ‘eyeballs’ watching cable programming. While cord cutting is shaving the total number of cable subscribers, the more substantial issue is that people are spending more time watching Netflix and other OTT content, at the expense of watching cable shows. This means that the ratings for most TV shows has been plummeting and taking with it the willingness of programmers to pay premium rates for ad slots. There is also a big age shift with younger viewers abandoning traditional cable programming at a much faster rate than older generations.

No Easy Shift to Streaming. A lot of programmers were counting on a shift to direct OTT content to help to reverse the shift in traditional TV viewers. For example, Disney / ESPN just announced that they will be offering online versions of their networks starting in early 2018.

But we also just saw NBC cancel their online offering Seeso. The network carried a significant amount of comedy programming and NBC tried to lure customers to pay $3.99 per month for the service. But they had very few takers and that failure is probably scaring the rest of the industry. Recent surveys by Nielsen and others have shown that viewers care as much about the platform as they do about the content. That means that they are only willing to buy a monthly subscription if they see a value in staying on a given platform. The programmers are all hoping that people will be willing to pay a small fee to watch one or two favorite shows, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. People value a platform like Netflix where they can move from show to show without the hassles of logging in to multiple platforms. This doesn’t bode well each programmer creating individual platforms consisting of the same content they show on traditional cable.

Pressure to Create More Content. There are newcomers like Netflix, Amazon and Apple that are spending billions annually to create new content. This is putting a lot of pressure on traditional cable networks to keep up, adding to their bottom line costs. There is always the reward for those handful of hits that become must-watch shows, but the most new content doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover the production costs.

What Does This Mean? All of these trends predict a poorer future for programmers. I think it means some of the following:

More mergers. We will probably see more mergers as a way to control costs. We are just now seeing the merger of Discovery and Scripps. But there were only seven major programmers before that merger, so there is only so much benefit that can be gained through mergers.

Faster rate increases. These are all publicly traded companies. They are going to try every avenue to maintain earnings, but in the face of dropping subscribers and flat ad revenues they are going to have little ultimate choice but to raise programming rates even faster. But they are also limited in some sense with this because most programming contracts with cable companies are signed on a three-year forward basis, and the prices are already locked for the next few years for most of their cable company customers.

Reduced expectations. Programmers have been some of the darlings of Wall Street for the last few decades. But as these new realities sink in there is going to have to be reduced stock prices for these companies as well as lowered expectations about their earnings potential. And in today’s stock-driven corporate world that is anathema. We may be seeing the first hints of an industry whose wheels are coming off.

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A recent study by comScore examined OTT usage in detail across the country. They studied the OTT viewing habits in 12,500 homes over time across all devices. They looked at 52 OTT services, which collectively account for virtually all of the OTT content available. Their study is the most comprehensive study of OTT that I’ve seen to date.

Not surprisingly Netflix is the largest OTT provider and accounted for 40% of all viewing hours of OTT content. I must admit with all of the hype about Netflix that I thought they would be larger. They were followed by YouTube at 18%, Hulu at 14%, Amazon at 7% and all of the other OTT sources sharing 21%.

When it came to consumer engagement, measured by the amount of time that people watch a given service, the leader is Hulu with the average Hulu household watching over 2.9 hours of their content per day. This was followed by Netflix at 2.2 hours, YouTube at 2.1 hours and Amazon at 2.0 hours per day.

Here are some other interesting statistics generated by the survey:

51 million homes in the US watched OTT content this past April. That is 41% of all homes.

The growth of OTT watching is exploding and only 44 million homes watched OTT in October 2016.

As you would expect, there is a substantial number of cord-cutters that watch OTT. The types of OTT viewers include 44% that also have a landline cable subscription, 22% that also have a satellite TV subscription, 18% that are pure cord-cutters, and 16% that mix OTT content with free content received through rabbit ears.

The average home watched OTT content 49 hours in a month. That viewing was spread on average across 15 viewing days – meaning that most homes don’t watch OTT content every day.

As you would expect, cord-cutters households watch OTT for more hours monthly than other households. For example, cord cutters watched Hulu 37 hours per month while other households watched 29. Cord cutters watched Netflix for 36 hours per month compared to 27 hours for other households.

OTT viewing largely matches regular TV viewing in that there is a big spike of viewing in the evening prime time hours.

However, OTT viewing differs from traditional cable with big spikes on weekends, largely due to binge-watching.

The survey shows that 10.1 million households use network TV apps (apps from a programmer such as HBO or ESPN).

There is an interesting correlation between the size of a household, the amount of OTT viewing, and whether a family has cut the cord. For cord cutting families, the smaller the size of the household the greater the amount of OTT viewing. But for families that still have a paid-cable subscription it’s reverse.

Single-member households are almost 50% more likely than average to be a cord cutter and 24% more likely than average to be a cord-never.

Cost of cable subscriptions have always been shown in other surveys as a factor in cord cutting. This survey shows a strong correlation between income and cord-cutting. The survey shows that hourseholds making less than $40,000 per year are cutting the cord at 19% more than average while households making between $75,000 and $100,000 are at 87% of average.

Their survey also was able to detail the devices used to watch OTT content on television screens. Of the 51 million homes that watched OTT in April, 38 million homes used a streaming stick / box like Roku, and 28 million homes used a smart TV.

The study also detailed penetration rates of streaming boxes / sticks for homes using WiFI: 16% own a Roku, 14% have Amazon Fire; 8% own Google hrome and 6% have AppleTV.

Samsung and Vizio are the big players in the smart TV market with shares in WiFi-connected homes of 33% and 30%. LG and Sony were next with 10% and 7% penetration with all other manufactures sharing the remaining 20% of the market.

The survey also analyzed Skinny bundles. They show that 3.1 million homes now have a skinny bundle. 2 million of those homes have SlingTV, with DirecTV Now and PlayStation Vue having most of the other customers. The survey shows that homes with one of these services watch the skinny bundle an average of 5.3 hours per day.

The main takeaway from this survey is a demonstration that OTT viewing has become mainstream behavior. OTT viewing is now part of the viewing habits of a little over half the of homes in the nation that have an in-home WiFi connection.

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Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers issued her annual slideshow on tech industry trends. As always she covers an amazing amount of information. The full slideshow can be found here.

Here are a few of the highlights that are of interest to ISPs:

Internet Growth. Worldwide Internet growth is still at about 10% annually with over 350 million new Internet users expected this year. At the end of 2016 there was 3.4 billion Internet subscribers, a global penetration rate of 46%. The worldwide industry has exploded since having 1.6 billion Internet subscribers in 2009.

Internet Usage. In the US the average Internet usage is now 5.6 hours per day per person, up from 5.4 hours in 2015. This includes 3.1 hours of mobile usage, 2.2 hours of desktop usage and 0.4 hours on other devices.

Netflix Growth. Netflix now earns 30% of the home video entertainment dollars in the US. The company had almost 94 million worldwide customers at the end of 2016 and is adding around 6 million new subscribers per quarter.

Interactive Gaming is Huge. There were 2.8 billion worldwide interactive gamers in 2016, up from 100 million in 1995. This is driving a huge amount of Internet bandwidth. The average age of a gamer in the US is 35.

Streaming Music. Streaming music now drives 52% of the revenue in the music industry. Less than a quarter of the industry revenues comes from physical media like CDs.

Smartphone Growth is Slowing. The growth of smartphones sales in 2016 was down sharply and only grew worldwide at 3%, down from 10% in 2015. With that said there were still over 1.4 billion phones sold in 2016 and there are 2.8 billion total smartphone users in the world, up 300 million since 2015. The industry has seen tremendous growth and there were only 300 million smartphone users in 2009. Around 84% of smartphones use Android.

Internet Shopping Continues to Grow. Online shopping is still growing at a torrid pace. Parcel deliveries in the US from Internet shopping were at 10 billion in 2016, up 9% over 2015 and up from 7 billion in 2010. It’s predicted that 7,000 retail outlets will close in 2017.

Online Advertising. In the US the amount of online advertising was $73 billion in 2016, up 22% from 2015. The amount of mobile advertising now equals the amount of desktop advertising. Desktop advertising has dropped by over $2 billion annually since 2015. Google and Facebook dominate US web advertising with the two companies getting 85% of ad revenues in 2016. Google earned over $35 billion in ad revenues for the year.

Voice Used for Queries. Voice is replacing typing and 20% of all queries made through smartphones are now done using voice instead of typing. It’s reported that the accuracy rate of voice recognition is now at 95%, up from 76% in 2013. It’s expected for voice interface to grow rapidly in homes and businesses due to voice recognition devices – Amazon Echo has sold over 10.5 million Echo devices by the end of 1Q 2017.

Social Media Changing Customer Loyalty. Over 82% of customers stopped doing business with a company after a bad experience. This is up from 76% in 2014, with the difference credited to the feedback from social media.

Immigrants and Tech. I’m not sure what this means, but 60% of the most highly valued US tech companies were founded by first or second-generation Americans including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

One thing that doesn’t get talked about a lot in the battle between broadcast TV and on-line video is video quality. For the most part today broadcast TV still holds the edge over on-line video.

When you think of broadcast TV over a cable system I can’t help but remember back twenty years ago when the majority of the channels on a cable system were analog. I remember when certain channels were snowy, when images were doubled with ghosts and the first couple of channels in the cable system were nearly unwatchable. Today the vast majority of channels on most cable systems are digital, but there are still exceptions. The conversion to digital resulted in a big improvement in transmission quality.

When cable systems introduced HDTV and the quality got even better. I can remember flipping back and forth between the HD and SD versions of the same channel on my Comcast system just to see the huge difference.

This is not to say that cable systems have eliminated quality issues. It’s still common on many cable systems to see pixilation, especially during high action scenes where the background is constantly changing. All cable systems are not the same, so there are differences in quality from one city to the next. All digital video on cable systems is compressed at the head-end and decompressed at the settop box. That process robs a significant amount of quality from a transmission and one only has to compare any cable movie to one from a Blu-ray to realize how much is lost in the translation.

In the on-line world buffered video can be as good as good as cable system video. But on-line video distributors tend to compress video even more than cable systems – something they largely can get away with since a lot of on-line video is watched on smaller screens. And this means that a side-by-side comparison of SD or HD movies would usually favor the cable system. But Netflix, Amazon and a few others have one advantage today with the spectacular quality of their 4K videos – there is nothing comparable on cable networks.

But on-line live-streamed video still has significant issues. I watch sports on-line and the quality is often poor. The major problem with live-streamed video is mostly due to delays in the signal getting to the user. Some of that delay is due to latency – either latency in the backbone network between the video creator and the ISP or latency in the connection between the ISP and the end-user. Unlike downloading a data file where your computer will wait until it has collected all of the needed packets, live-streamed video is sent to end-users with whatever pixels have arrived at the needed time. This creates all sorts of interesting issues when watching live sports. For instance, there is pixilation, but it doesn’t look like the pixilation you see on cable network. Instead parts of the screen often get fuzzy when they aren’t receiving all the pixels. There are also numerous problems with the video. And it’s still not uncommon for the entire picture to freeze for a while, which can cause an agonizing gap when you are watching sports since it always seems to happen at a critical time.

Netflix and Amazon have been working with the Internet backbone providers and the ISPs to fix some of these issues. Latency delays in getting to the ISPs is shrinking and, at least for the major ISPs, will probably not be an issue. But the one issue that still needs to be resolved is the crashes that happen when the Internet gets overloaded when the demand is too high. We’re seeing ISPs bogging down when showing a popular stream like the NBA finals, compared to a normal NBA game that might only be watched by a hundred thousand viewers nationwide.

One thing in the cable system’s favor is that their quality ought to be improving a lot over the next few years. The big cable providers will be implementing the new ATSC 3.0 video standard that is going to result in a significant improvement in picture quality on HD video streams. The FCC approved the new standard earlier this year and we ought to see it implemented in systems starting in 2018. This new standard will allow cable operators to improve the color clarity and contrast on existing HD video. I’ve seen a demo of a lab version of the standard and the difference is pretty dramatic.

One thing we don’t know, of course, is how much picture quality means to the average video user. I know my teenage daughter seems quite happy watching low-quality video made by other teens on Snapchat, YouTube or Facebook Live. Many people, particularly teens, don’t seem to mind watching video on a smartphone. Video quality makes a difference to many people, but time will tell if improved video quality will stem the tide of cord cutting. It seems that most cord cutters are leaving due to the cost of traditional TV as well as the hassle of working with the cable companies and better video might not be a big enough draw to keep them paying the monthly cable bill.

Like this:

One of the reasons touted in the press for the recent popularity of cord cutting is the desire of people to save money over a traditional cable TV subscription. But as I look at what’s popular on the web I wonder if the savings are really going to be there for people who like to watch a variety of the best content.

There has been an explosion of companies that are pursuing unique video content, and this means that great content can now be found at many different places on the web. Interestingly, most of this great content is not available on traditional TV, other than the content provided by the premium movie channels. But considering the following web platforms that are creating unique content:

Netflix. They are the obvious king of unique content and release new shows, specials, movies and documentaries seemingly weekly. And they seem to have a wide variety of content aimed at all demographics.

Hulu. They are a bit late to the game. But the newly released The Handmaid’s Tale is getting critical acclaim and will be part of a quickly growing portfolio of unique content.

HBO. HBO has always had a few highly popular series with Game of Thrones still drawing huge audiences.

CBS All-Access. CBS has made a bold move by offering the new series Star Trek: Discovery only online. It’s bound to draw a lot of customers to the online service.

Amazon Prime. The company says they are going to invest billions in unique programming and are aiming at overtaking Netflix. Their recent hit The Man in the High Castle is evidence of the quality programming they are pursuing.

Showtime. They have historically created limited amounts of unique content but are now also looking to create a lot more. Their new show Twin Peaks has come out with high reviews.

Starz. This network is also now chasing new content and has a hit series with American Gods.

Seeso. Even services that most people have never heard of, such as Seeso are creating popular content such as the comedy series My Brother, My Brother and Me.

YouTube Red. The industry leader of unique content is YouTube which has allowed anybody to create content. While most of this is still free, the platform is now putting a lot of great content such as the comedy Rhett and Link’s Buddy System behind a paywall.

Subscribing to the above online services with the minimum subscriptions costs $79 per month (and that’s without figuring in the annual cost of Amazon Prime, which most people buy because of the free shipping from Amazon). The above line-up doesn’t include any sports and you’d have to buy a $30 subscription from Sling TV to watch ESPN and a few other popular sports networks. ESPN recently announced that they still don’t have any plans to launch a standalone web product but are instead pursuing being included in the various skinny bundles.

Not considered, though, in the above list are numerous other less-known paid OTT subscriptions available on line. As listed in this recent blog there are dozens of other platforms for people who like specialized content like Japanese anime or British comedies.

Of course, one thing the above list shows is that there is a world of content these days that is not being created by the major networks or the traditional cable networks. There is likely more money pouring into the creation of content outside of the traditional networks.

So OTT doesn’t seem to save as much as hoped for people that wish to enjoy a variety of popular content across different providers. But there are other benefits driving people to OTT programming. One of the great benefits of OTT programming is the ability to subscribe and cancel services at will. I have been trying various OTT networks and it’s really tempting to subscribe to each for a month or two until you’ve seen what you want and then move on to something else. I’m starting to think that’s the way I will use these services as long as they continue to allow easy egress and exit.

And OTT programming allows for non-linear TV watching. As long as somebody lives near to a metropolitan area a cord cutter can still view the traditional network channels using rabbit ears. But what a lot of cord cutters are finding is that they quickly lose their tolerance of linear programming. I know that when I travel and have TV available in the room that I only watch it if I want to catch a football or basketball game. I can no longer tolerate the commercial breaks or the inability to pause linear TV while I want to do something else. And that, perhaps more than anything, is what will bring down traditional cable TV. As much as cable companies tout TV Everywhere, their basic product is still showing content linearly at fixed times. There is such a huge volume of great OTT content available any time on any device that it’s not hard for somebody to walk away from the traditional networks and still always have something you want to watch.